ESPN Motion

Soccerholic · Mar 13, 2003

Has anyone else seen ESPN Motion? Every day, they put a few minutes of various highlights onto their website. The quality of the video is not only much better than all the video downloads that I have seen - it's close to television quality - but it is also much faster to access than other video downloads. Anyone know what technology ESPN is utilizing to do this?

cjschlos · Mar 13, 2003

Windows Media 9 Series

ShadowNC · Mar 14, 2003

They install a client on your system which basically runs all the time, and downloads video clips throughout the day behind the scenes. This is what makes the video 'download so fast', it's already on your system before you go to espn.com

Found this on the nytimes.com site...

Initially, at least, the video offerings will be limited. The program downloads a single video clip when the computer is not being used, typically overnight. This allows the video to start faster and be of higher quality than so-called streaming video, which downloads only when users initiate it.

After receiving an overnight download, the first time the user visits ESPN.com the next day, the graphic box in the center of the home page — which would otherwise have a photograph associated with its lead story — will instead instantly begin to play a video segment. Typically, these are short game highlights or player interviews associated with the biggest sports story of the day. After the clip is a 15-second commercial.
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Soccerholic · Mar 14, 2003

That's what I thought was happening - it's downloading while I'm not looking. The quality is so good, I am assuming that this will continue to grow. I would love to see ESPN and/or MLS use this technology to provide soccer highllights.

arwlin777 · Mar 17, 2003

Originally posted by Soccerholic
That's what I thought was happening - it's downloading while I'm not looking. The quality is so good, I am assuming that this will continue to grow. I would love to see ESPN and/or MLS use this technology to provide soccer highllights.
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I have yet to see anything soccer related. They put up the top 10 plays of the day usually, and I never saw one soccer play yet. Hopefully eventually they will show some soccer highlights.